UX Design plays a vital role in the success of your website or app, and while the numbers do not tell the whole story, they do help you assess the situation quickly and easily.
More and more industry sectors are realizing the importance of user experience for business, but investing in experience can seem very subjective at times, which is where UX metrics come in.
Every successful project is born with well-defined goals – not just businesses, but also anything related to user experience. After all, the user is the customer, and if a product does not meet their expectations, either they never come back or buy it out of a lack of options, only to switch over as soon as an alternative appears.
Several criteria can guarantee the quality of a product, whether it’s a website, a software or an application. These criteria help to understand whether or not the user is satisfied with each aspect of the product in question. As a result, the team involved in the project can take action to correct failures and plan next steps.
These criteria are known as metrics, or so-called “KPIs” (Key Performance Indicators), which are linked to the commercial objective of the product as well as its use.
When linked to usage and user experience, metrics should be defined within a comprehensive format, capable of showing the main usage problems while measuring whether business objectives can be achieved efficiently.
Measuring the return on specific actions is essential for further fostering a customer-centric culture, as well as “proving” whether they lead to concrete results. In this article, we’ll look at some of the UX metrics that can help you to measure your efforts.
What Are UX Metrics?
UX metrics are indicators that facilitate the measurement of results of actions focused on customer experience. In addition to understanding whether the users’ experience is satisfactory, they allow insights into the use of the product and potential problems that need to be solved.
It is important to note that UX metrics can be both quantitative and qualitative, and are usually divided into the following three categories:
- Descriptions that show what happened;
- Customer perception;
- Results.
Types Of User Experience KPIs
User experience KPIs can be measured in two ways:
Quantitative
In this model it is possible to assess how many users actually managed to complete a workflow, which navigation errors were made and which are the most urgent and least urgent corrections that should be queued by the team involved in the project. Data is usually collected from a large sample of users and there is no user interaction, only monitoring through tools, including OKR templates.
Qualitative
this is the best way to evaluate the performance of the product. Data is collected from a limited number of users, and interacted with via usability tests or interviews. This type of data guarantees genuine feedback, allowing us to accurately identify whether the product meets the user’s needs and should inform the team’s next steps.
Which Indicators Should We Monitor?
This will depend on your OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). The idea is to reconcile users’ interests with financial returns for the company.
This isn’t as hard as it sounds, since designing good user experiences is beneficial for everyone – for the company, which generates much-needed connections; and for users, who are presented with uncomplicated processes when going about their daily activities.
Results can be measured to justify financial investment, based on UX metrics. A good user experience is the result of careful planning, analysis, testing and investment, all wrapped up in a continuous process of improvement.
A good UX improves KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and ROI (Return on Investment), which is why monitoring UX metrics is so important.
Here are some indicators that point to a positive return on UX investments:
- Increase in conversion rate;
- Increase in customer retention rate;
- Improvement in satisfaction rates;
- Reduction in products’ time-to-market;
- Reduction of tickets to problem resolution areas;
- Time reduction in task completion (related to user);
- Reduction of user errors;
- Increase in brand loyalty.
Bear in mind that neither model should be relied on exclusively – in order to guarantee an assertive analysis, data from both should be cross-referenced to inform decisions that will lead to positive product impacts.
Important KPIs
Usability
Metrics related to usability should focus on how easy it is to perform a task, while identifying the success rate and ease of use. They can also include more specific metrics like icon recognition, menu navigation, moments of confusion, hesitation, etc.
Engagement
These metrics are useful for understanding how much people interact with the product, the amount of attention paid to the product, how much time people spend on a workflow, and whether users feel good about the product.
Conversion
The metrics in this category help to identify trends and design new solutions so that the product is more responsive to the needs of its users. This tends to be the most important metric for any company, but it should be analyzed in conjunction with other metrics in order to identify the “why”.
Defining UX Metrics
Metrics that generate real impact for a product should address not just improvements in the user experience, but also other product objectives, across three dimensions:
- Descriptive metrics, to tell what happened;
- Perception metrics, to focus on how customers perceive the product;
- Outcome metrics, to describe what customers have done or can be expected to do based on their perceptions.
Knowing your customer is key when it comes to user experience. Get to know their pain points and their goals, and develop solutions based on this information.
Using differentiated visions and alignment focused on improving the service or product for the user, UX metrics check strengths and weaknesses to strategically define and follow plans, and achieve the company’s goals.
